Services for Young People

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to lead the debate under your august chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I am delighted to see that four fellow members of the Education Committee have made it to this Thursday afternoon debate. The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) is making a ticking movement with her hand, and she is right to imply that we deserve a medal of honour.

The debate is about our report, “Services for young people”. I intend to set out its key conclusions and the policy developments since its publication, and to comment on questions that the Government have still not answered. It is a pleasure to see the Minister present. I am sure that, given his personal commitment, those questions that have not yet been answered will receive answers this afternoon and that we will treasure them when they are duly delivered.

The Committee conducted its inquiry over six months during 2010-11. Our aim was to consider the relationship between universal and targeted services; who accesses services and what they want from them; the roles of the voluntary, statutory and private sectors; and the impact of funding cuts and the scope for commissioning services in future.

The Committee received 158 pieces of written evidence. We heard from young people, both in person and via an online forum, which we ran for several months with the Student Room and through which we received more than 200 responses. Young people were represented on the panels on many occasions when we took oral evidence—I say that for the benefit of anyone who may have ignorantly thought that young people were not involved fully and consistently throughout the process.

We published the report on 15 June 2011 and it was well received by the sector. The Young Men’s Christian Association said that,

“it focuses in on many of the key issues and problems that are being faced by youth service providers across the country.”

Children & Young People Now said that

“at long last there is an attempt from Westminster to address the challenge of serving young people in these austere times”,

and called on the Government to rise to that challenge. On receipt of the Government’s response, we decided to publish a further report commenting on it, because it did not tackle several issues satisfactorily.

Since then, the Government’s cross-departmental strategy on young people, Positive for Youth, was published in December 2011. The Government make a number of welcome commitments and take up some of the Committee’s recommendations. In other areas, however, they do not go far enough. I will return to the merits of that strategy document in a moment, but first I want to set out the Committee’s key conclusions.

Our inquiry found that young people spend more than 80% of their time outside formal education, yet local authorities spend 55 times more on formal education than on services for young people outside the school day. Acknowledging that inequality, we set out to understand which services are most effective at supporting and developing young people outside school.

Witnesses with different perspectives agreed on three key points: first, that public spending cuts had disproportionately affected youth services; secondly, that there was great potential for youth services to help transform young people’s lives; and thirdly, that services had long been poor at proving their impact and, thus, at making their case to Government—a weakness that is all the more pertinent in times of austerity.

On funding, the Committee concluded that the picture looked bleak and was likely to worsen. Funding had been doubly hit, with the removal of ring fences from central Government grants and the 11% overall reduction to the total value of youth service funds that go to local authorities and are redirected into the early intervention grant. We calculated that local authority spending on youth services in 2010-11 equated to only £77.28 per young person a year, which is about 21p a day.

Two surveys in 2011 showed that more than £100 million would be cut from local youth service budgets by March 2012, with average cuts of 28% and up to 100% in some areas. Even the Department for Education agreed, concluding that

“the scale of budget reductions and the pace at which decisions are being made”

was

“limiting the scope for… innovation and fundamental reform”.

The Committee was alarmed enough by the apparent extent of the cuts to urge the Government to consider using their powers to direct local authorities to commission adequate services for young people, which they have a statutory duty to do.

On the impact of services, we received strong personal stories from many young people about their value. One young person wrote on an online forum that

“when young people come to the centre they know they aren’t going to be judged and they can be who they want to be, for some of them it gives a break from stresses outside”,

while another stated that

“without my youth workers I would now be in a lot of trouble with education, work and drugs. But with their help I have been able to sort myself out and get onto the right path and stop the bad things I was doing over a year ago”.

We received a lot of anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of youth services and their individual impact, but, as I have said, collectively, services struggled to show the impact of their work in an easily defensible and statistically strong way.

The importance of youth services, coupled with the limited public resources available for them, makes it more vital that effective services are identified and funded. That is in line with the work of the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) on early intervention. The most important thing when spending limited public resources is to find those interventions that will make the greatest difference. Early intervention does not need to take place only during pre-school years; it could equally take place during the teenage years by getting involved with people who might be at risk and intervening early to support more positive behaviours.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate on the Committee’s report. Does he agree that it would be helpful if we moved away from the confusion surrounding the definition of early intervention? Some people take “early” to mean years 0 to 3, while others take it to mean early in the life cycle of an actual problem. Both things are, of course, important, but they are often conflated.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right. The hon. Member for Nottingham North is also right to not only emphasise the importance of early intervention, but to want to build an evidence base to justify additional public funding. If investing another £100 million into the lives of young people means getting a payback and saving many more pounds later, even the person with the driest heart in the Treasury will see the benefits. I am delighted—this is a tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s work—that the Government have agreed to fund an early intervention foundation that will do precisely that. I hope that, as that work develops, it will look not only at the early years but, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) has rightly said, at early intervention throughout a young person’s childhood.

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for being so generous in giving way early in his speech. He may intend to address this issue later, but will he comment on some of the difficulties involved in measuring the effects of different programmes? We discussed and received evidence about those problems in Committee. The prisoner scheme in Peterborough is a perfect, text-book example of payment by results, but the proposition for a youth club is completely different because of the different client group, control group, time period and the different influences on people’s lives.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. As he has rightly said, we considered the issue. In principle, I do not think that there is any division between the parties on payment by results. The question is: who is paid by results? Are we really going to try and collect data on a once-a-week youth club in a particularly deprived area which has a brilliant community leader who builds on the history in that area, where parents themselves attended clubs locally and there is great support, and it really brings the community together? Will the expense be completely disproportionate to the effort of collecting it? The answer is probably yes. The danger of identifying something at a micro level where we can easily pay someone to deliver results is that they will then always have to be able to provide that at that micro level before we support the whole principle, and that could limit its impact.

Payment by results is probably better introduced at a higher level. For example, Birmingham city council could have a partnership with Goldman Sachs for the money, Serco for certain other skills, and seek to bring in additional private money to support and strengthen the focus of the services it provides. That extra money could be brought in to support those services on an evidence base that makes the council—and the hard-hearted business people—believe that they can deliver those improved outcomes for young people. As a Government and as a society, we need to be more effective in ensuring that the money to deliver improved outcomes for young people, which we vote for in this place, actually helps to deliver them. It is important to get the mechanics right.

[Damian Hinds]

I promise to be quiet after this brief intervention. Does my hon. Friend agree that what comes up time and again in talking about how to identify a good parenting programme or a good programme for teenagers, is that we know it when we see it? For payment by results, the trick is to leverage the knowing it when we see it so that we can identify the individuals or organisations who are good, and then work out who else to invest money in for the future of our young people.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As long as there is accountability and people are driven by delivering the outcomes at the end, they should have discretion over how they use their budget. There could be investment in the Friday evening group I mentioned if there was confidence that it was helping to meet our overall goals for delivering change in the local community.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister’s point was well made. We need to get everybody—in my example, from Birmingham city council downwards—focused on outcomes. The danger—this happens in all Governments; it is not peculiar to the previous one—is that, despite talking about rewarding success and penalising failure, the tendency is to reward failure. For those who deliver services, the less they succeed, the more money they get and the bigger the budget that comes to them. To break out of that and ensure that everyone is focused on outcomes and that the bureaucracies that administer these things see it as in their interests to change the lives of the young people for whom they are responsible, would be a good thing, and I wish the Minister luck in delivering it.

Returning to the difficulty of services demonstrating their impact, the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services told us that although

“anecdotal evidence and young people’s stories”—

were available—

“what is really difficult is some sort of set of statistics whereby we could show the total amount of investment and the total amount of return”.

That conclusion was borne out in independent evaluations, including by Ofsted.

Although the impact of youth work encounters with young people can certainly be hard to quantify, the Committee said that local authorities needed some indicators on which to commission services. The Committee recommended that the Government commission NCVYS to develop an outcomes framework that could be used across the country. However, we said that it should be not just a question of counting the number of young people using a service or the number of encounters—in some ways, failure would be rewarded again by such an approach—but a measure of young people’s social and personal development and that they should be involved in its design.

In addition to those three earlier points, the national citizen service—the Government’s new volunteering programme for 16-year-olds—was a key area that witnesses felt strongly about. We addressed that service in our report, and although we liked the idea of a community volunteering project and a rite of passage for young people and found the scheme’s aims entirely laudable, as did almost all our witnesses, we questioned whether the Government could justify its expense.

We discovered that, based on the cost per head of the 2011 pilot, the NCS would cost £355 million each year to provide a universal offer of a national citizen service to 16-year-olds, assuming just a 50% take-up. Even allowing for economies of scale, we felt that there was a risk that the costs of the NCS—a six-week voluntary summer service for 16-year-olds—could outstrip the entire annual spending by local authorities on youth services, which totalled £350 million in 2009-10. Instead, we recommended that the core idea of the national citizen service be retained, including its laudable aims, but that it be significantly amended to become a form of accreditation for existing programmes that could prove that they met the Government’s aims of social mixing and personal and social development, with the component parts of NCS, such as a residential experience and a social action task.

The Government could have said, but did not—I often thought that if I were a Minister I would have said it, although the Minister did not—that the NCS was just being piloted and that the aim of the pilots was to help to identify ways to deliver more. The Government said that they wanted to secure and leverage in more funding and to ensure that they did not scale up the prices that the initial pilot suggested.

We received our initial response from the Government both directly—orally— and in writing from the Minister, who seemed less than entirely thrilled. We felt that the Government, in their initial response to our report, failed to address fully a number of issues, so we wrote a further report, calling on Ministers to clarify their intentions on how the Government intended to measure outcomes from youth services, which is pretty important, given everything that we have been talking about so far, and the grounds on which they would judge whether a local authority had made sufficient provision, because there is a statutory duty on local authorities.

Although the Government said that they were prepared to intervene, they would not tell us on what grounds they would do so, other than in the most general terms. The Government would not describe what services would, or would not, look like if they were likely to trigger intervention, thus leading to the likelihood that councils could continue to make cuts to youth services that the Government described as disproportionate.

We also asked the Government to clarify the total public spending on youth services before the early intervention grant. The Government said that they did not accept our figure—£350 million—so we asked them to tell us what their figure was. As they did not accept our figure, we thought that a reasonable request. We also asked them to tell us how they planned to fund the NCS after the two pilot years. What have the Government said in response to our two reports and, subsequently, in their Positive for Youth strategy?

The aspirations of Positive for Youth have been well received in the sector. The National Children’s Bureau said:

“we are pleased with Positive for Youth’s holistic approach to giving young people more opportunities and better support”.

The National Youth Agency and the NCVYS both welcomed the Government’s publication of a comprehensive strategy, drawn up in consultation with the sector and produced in less than two years after the creation of the Government. However, many youth organisations are concerned that the strategy is vague about how its aspirations will be implemented, so reflecting a worry of the Committee that was mentioned in its report.

Catch22, which works with particularly deprived youngsters, commented that the levers for change in the Government’s policy “lacked bite”. That view was echoed by the Children’s Commissioner, Dr Maggie Atkinson, who said:

“without action this strategy will amount to no more than words on a page”.

The NYA qualified its support for Positive for Youth, saying:

“no vision or policy is worth anything if it isn’t followed by clear and decisive action”.

The chief executive of YMCA England, Ian Green, went further:

“the Government’s vision will come to nothing if those responsible for the delivery of services on the ground are not prepared to implement it, and the Positive for Youth statement is very light on how it intends to address this fact”.

[Damian Hinds]

I suppose that we get used to such e-mails, but does not my hon. Friend accept that it is a statement of the blindingly obvious to say that things will not happen if people do not implement them?

[Mr Stuart]

I was reflecting on those words even as I read them, but their implications are clear. If there is no firm action plan, the criticism—to spell it out for my hon. Friend in case he, too, is missing the blindingly obvious—is that if the strategy produced by the Government after such a long period of preparation does not spell out exactly what they are going to do and how they will hold to account those responsible for delivering services, there is every danger that we will have fine words and no real delivery. That might be a statement of the obvious, but there is a serious risk, with a strategy that is light on content, in respect of whether there is confidence that it will deliver on the ground.

Positive for Youth has the right focus on fostering young people’s aspirations and on their personal and social development. It is good to hear the Government praise the potential of young people and extol the qualities and achievements of the vast majority, especially in light of the negativity towards young people generated by last summer’s riots. The Government and the Minister are right to emphasise the positive. If all we ever measure are provisions averting negative behaviour by young people, we suggest that their natural tendency is to behave negatively. In fact, the Minister wants to emphasise—the Government are right about this—that most young people are positive members of our society and that we should support and celebrate their positive behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) is absolutely right, and his point is central to the matter. We should not think that youth services are just about statutory provision, because they are not. They are all part of the big society, which is encouraging many villages in my constituency to start thinking about providing the services that people need, including youth services.

I think that I have made my point about the rich variety of facilities, clubs, sports clubs and so on with which young people can get involved, and about the powerful role played by charities in providing facilities.

[Damian Hinds]

Before concluding his remarks, perhaps my hon. Friend will touch on the provision made by what these days we call faith communities and in the old days used to call Churches. There is an ongoing debate about the role of Christianity and other faiths and religions in public life, and a lot of churches provide important youth facilities that often are not restricted only to members of one particular denomination. The King’s Arms in Petersfield is one such example—

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Order. We are talking about the Select Committee report, and although it may be nice to mention every group in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, I doubt that we have got time for them all.